


Unbreakable

by thisbluespirit



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: 500 prompts, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 16:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13035123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/pseuds/thisbluespirit
Summary: “Love is weakness, Regina,”her mother tells her.  It’s a lie.





	Unbreakable

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ramasi in the [500 Prompts Meme](http://lost-spook.dreamwidth.org/291842.html): 210: fragile as a dream – Regina (OUaT)

Regina’s mother tells her that love is weakness, but Regina won’t believe it. Love is the important thing, love is powerful; so she tells young Snow White. She’s thinking of Daniel and her father. They’re the ones who taught her about love, never her heartless mother.

But whether it’s weakness or strength, love _is_ fragile, and so is belief, so is hope. Regina watches them shatter in less than the space of a heartbeat and lie in pieces amidst the straw on a stable floor.

 

It’s not the first time, though she doesn’t know it: somewhere, forgotten in her mind, lies the memory of a sister lost and found and lost again. Love cannot exist when it’s not remembered. (It is, her mother says yet again, only a weakness. It doesn’t matter.) 

 

Love for Snow lies dead in the castle hall, shot down by a handful of innocent words. Anger steals its place – anger and the desire for revenge. There’s nothing weak or fragile about Regina’s darker emotions. She tears the whole kingdom apart with the fire of her hate, and makes everyone pay for her mother’s crimes.

 

When it comes to her father, she does the deed herself: she weighs love against hate and finds it wanting. She takes the thing she loves the most and leaves it death and ashes on the altar of revenge. It hurts, but it always does in the end. Love is breakable. Love is a weakness. It’s not worth keeping.

 

She finds she has it wrong only far too late: she holds her tiny son in her arms and can barely breathe for fear. Because love is fragile, love is breakable; she knows that far too well. But it isn’t weak. It comes back, back from death, from banishment, from anything. Smother it, ignore it, curse it, and there it is, growing up again through the cracks. This time, this love, she’ll do everything she can to keep it safe, to keep her son. This time, she won’t let it break.

 

As it turns out, this time, everything breaks, everything she has and is – everything but love. As she told Snow long ago, it’s the strongest magic there is. Love defeats her and leaves her wounded on the ground; it’s how it ends her curse and sets her free.

Love is, she knows again, never a weakness, no matter how it hurts.


End file.
